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Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Happy Year of the New, bloggophiles! After the unprecedented success of the critical review of 'Christmas Is Really Fantastic' by that smooth crooner, Frank Sidebottom, it is of extreme necessity that a return is made by the one writer, me, Hiscox-Wormegay. Sidebottom's Christmas offering shot back into the charts following my review, peaking at no. 1 in the Halifax Woolworth vinyl charts, allowing Sidebottom Industries to hire an aggressive legal team which now spends every waking hour trawling the netspace for sound pirates and image tealeaves to send to the e-gallows.

Up to be roasted on this fine evening is something I hoped never to roll eyes across. Imagine the scenario. It's 7.30am and it's your birthday. You've gone to bed late, excited at the prospect of no one reminding you how old and decrepit you've become. Yet some youth-saturated privy stain claiming to be your niece or nephew has dispatched to you a card, in which they have scribed some wit intended to enrage you. And splashed across the front of the card, like a herring gull struck against the canopy of a BAe Typhoon, is that hideous of northerly, coal-encrusted dumplings, Fred Dibnah. Now, this is not intended as a slur against the short, lumpy steeple pervert. Indeed, I dare not utter a single nastiness against the good name of the rotund steam imp. But nothing reminds one of the decay of nature quite so much as the laughing, sooty face of Dibnah.

You've pictured the scene, and you've wept lumpy tears at the thought of it. However, it may become a reality. Bob Art Models, a relatively new outfit from Fenlander-Falklander-Fenlander-Suffolk-Londerner-Northerner Robert Follen, is producing micro-batches of these hideous caricatures, available as 140x140mm cards. That's not all Bob Art Models produces; I shall be reviewing other monstrosities over the coming months. But Dibnah is a good place to start for one very excellent reason: it sells. Now, I've seen a lot of the world. In the early years of last century, I led an expedition of forty men to Northern Africa and managed to make it back with almost three of them - for which I was knighted. (I gave the knighthood back when my 2003 single "How To Kill Pygmies" failed to chart.) But in all my travels, I've never met someone who could put Dibnah on a card and get people to part with cash for it - even if it is a very reasonable £2.50 (carriage is free!). Follen is clearly some kind of a genius; he could sell moral destitution to the Taliban and E numbers to Disneyland.

So, as is traditional in reviews, it's time to put stars all over Fred - or not, as may be the case.

There you go, five stars. That means that despite internal protestations, you should go to Bob Art Models's celebrity card repository here and buy up all Robert's stock.